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Customer Story

Sparco Saves Time and Cost with New Cloud Platform Initiative

Dutch marketing maverick works its magic with a new cloud platform and enhanced infrastructure
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Related services
Cloud, AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Industry
IT and Business

The Dutch marketing company Sparco International specializes in customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty programs designed for both consumers and businesses alike. The company achieves this through a mix of targeted online and offline incentives and experiences that bring customers closer with brand affinity and awareness. Sparco was founded in 2000 and has a distribution center complete with its own online platform called Webcentives. Its clients include ING, KLM, American Express, and ALD Automotive among others. The company currently operates in 150 countries in the automotive, food, energy, healthcare, construction, aviation, telecom, and ICT sector.
Why
Ensure a thriving 24/7 cloud-native infrastructure to satisfy customer needs
What
Upgrade hosting to a more flexible, scalable hosting platform
How
Build a new, fully functional supporting IT infrastructure to match growing demands

Finding Flexibility

As Sparco grew, its hosting needs were not being met. Processes were overly complicated, time-consuming, and rigid, not allowing for the flexibility the company wanted. Moreover, reliance on the hosting provider meant Sparco was left to wait for certain actions to be performed. Because of this lack of control, Sparco opted to choose another provider. Xebia was called in to guide the company on its journey to find a better, more suitable host. Xebia was well known to Sparco for its quick turnaround and thorough training.

Meeting Growing Demands

Revamping their hosting structure meant Sparco had to decide which hosting platform it wanted. While Microsoft was a large part of the existing environment, the company ultimately chose AWS for its cost, ease of migrating, and features. With the help of Xebia, Sparco did a deep dive into its existing environment and learned how best to build up that environment to meet its growing needs. It was agreed that Xebia would guide the way in setting up the new cloud architecture, dividing the project into three parts: design, migration, and costs.

“The platform of Sparco International was built up in a data center of a Dutch independent managed hosting provider. Although this solution met Sparco’s needs to some extent, they were actually looking for more flexibility. Xebia helped Sparco find that flexibility.”
Sparco International
Lian van Os Project Manager

AWS and DevOps

Sparco wanted to combine ease of use with cost-effective scalability. The solution Xebia chose was to build a landing zone where running secure, scalable workloads for testing, production, and shared services would be possible with minimal disruption. These three separate environments were then built in multiple Availability Zones to withstand AZ failure. This ensures that should one zone fail, the others located in different zones should not. The web application itself is hosted on Amazon EC2, while content is stored on FSx for Windows, providing a perfect compromise to Sparco’s existing windows components. This new infrastructure gave Sparco total onboarding freedom, flexibility to scale, and the capacity to work in a DevOps way towards more innovation.

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